Morphemes and their types

Grammatical morphemes

Languages express concepts via two types of meaningful sound: grammatical morphemes and lexemes. Lexemes are simply noun, verb, and adjective stems which express general concepts. Grammatical morphemes are sometimes referred to as 'function words'. 'Grammatical morpheme' is a better term for the functions of language are expressed not only by words but by suffixes, prefixes, and unaccented particles, too. They belong to closed classes to which speakers may not add nor subtract and never refer to general cognitive categories. Grammatical morphemes are those bits of linguistic sound which mark the grammatical categories of language (Tense, Number, Gender, Aspect), each of which has one or more functions (Past, Present, Future are functions of Tense; Singular and Plural are functions of Number). So suffixes like -s and -ed as well as particles like the (Definite) and not (Negative) are grammatical morphemes because they express grammatical functions, not general concepts.

Stylistic Morphology 

Stylistic Morphology deals with the expressive means and stylistic devices on morphological level. The main language unit of morphological level is a morpheme. There are a lot of definitions of a morpheme, but the most wide-spread and accepted in present-day linguistics is the following definition: a morpheme – is the smallest meaningful language unit that can be found in a word. According to the role they play in word construction, morphemesare subdivided into root morphemes and affixes. Morphology as a part of linguistics deals first of all with forms, functions and meanings of affixes. Affixes are divided into two main types: 1) word-building or derivational morphemes: to work – worker, to read – readable, name – namely, workman – workmanship; 2) formative morphemes: boy – boys, lived – lived – is living – has lived. Stylistic morphology deals only with the functions of the formative morphemes because word-building morpheme is a special aspect of linguistics. Formative morphemes are divided in its turn into: 1) synthetic morphemes: boys, lived, comes, going; 2) analytical morphemes: has invited, is invited, does not invite; 3) morphemes using root vowel gradation: write – wrote, meet – met; 4) suppletive morphemes: go – went.
Formative morphemes don’t function independently, they function in the structure of a word. They form different word-forms which indicate different meanings of grammatical categories – number, case, definiteness / indefiniteness, person, voice, tense, aspect, mood, etc.
An expressive means exists in the language due to the fact that the given language unit has both denotative and connotative meanings in its semantic structure, and as it has connotative meaning it is a marked member of a stylistic opposition. An EM can be realized only due to the paradigmatic relations. And we should stress that the main, the basic difference between a word and a word-form is the following: 1) a word possesses denotative meaning and can possess or acquire in a context connotative meaning; 2) any grammatical form has only denotative meaning if taken out of any context. Taken out of a context a grammatical form cannot be defined as stylistically marked, it has no connotative (or additional) meaning.

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